


What Men May Do

by M_Leigh



Category: Veep
Genre: F/M, Love Troubles, Post-Season 4, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 17:48:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6161511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Leigh/pseuds/M_Leigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>After a long pause, he added, “your mom likes me.”</i> </p><p> <i>“I know,” Amy said, folding her arms in front of her. “She never shuts the fuck up about you; no matter what I tell her, she will not be disabused of the notion that you are some kind of knight in fucking shining armor who’s going to rescue me from spinsterhood.”</i></p><p>Amy and Dan first meet in a Colorado parking lot. Time passes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Men May Do

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in a generic future in which everybody is back working at the White House, since I assume that is what's going to wind up happening, and it seemed silly to work out the logistics of engineering the circumstances when we'll find out soon enough what actually happens on the show. Frankly it seemed a bit silly to write this fic now anyway but I just rewatched the whole show and was feeling the bug. The election didn't help.
> 
> See endnotes for one content warning that I chose not to put in the tags. Otherwise it's about what you'd expect from the show. Enjoy!

**I.**  


_Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,_  
_Men were deceivers ever;_  
_One foot in sea, and one on shore,_  
_To one thing constant never._

 _—Much Ado About Nothing_ , William Shakespeare _  
_

 

The first time they met was in a high school gymnasium in a suburb a good forty-minute drive outside of Denver. It was, Amy would have said, if she ever told anybody the story (which she didn’t), the least romantic place imaginable, not only because the fluorescent lighting was so unbelievably fucking unflattering. It was like being in a changing room trying on clothes you weren’t going to buy, and then getting distracted by pulling at your fat and admiring the circles under your eyes, except that instead of looking in an actual mirror you were looking in a metaphorical one, in the form of dozens of other haggard staffers and journalists who hadn’t slept in at least a month.

Back then, she was still young enough that she was running on energy that felt at least partially natural; she had been naïve enough to think she wouldn’t start getting tired—really _tired_ , in some kind of fundamental way—until she was at least fifty, or sixty probably. This, of course, was ridiculous. At twenty-three she had never even had a massage, because she’d never needed one: she’d felt so anxious about everything, at twenty-three, when in fact she had had _no idea_. As an adult (she had not been an adult at twenty-three), she tried not to remember this; it was too depressing.

She had been in Colorado for the caucus, of course, and had been sent off to various random high school gymnasia because she wasn’t important, although she was less unimportant than the people who had been relegated to what was truly the middle of fucking nowhere, where there probably wasn’t even press. When she had asked to go to one of the better caucus sites, the deputy campaign manager had looked at her for a moment blankly, said, “Why the fuck would I let you do that?” and then walked away as though she didn’t exist, which was kind of functionally true. Most people would have found this demoralizing, but Amy had thought about the fact that he was going to get old someday—faster than she was, that was for sure—and that she would consequently be able to slowly usurp him—not on this campaign, obviously, but in a general sense. Someday, he was going to know who she was—he definitely did not know her name now—and feel bad about the fact that he had less power than she did, even though she didn’t have a dick. The more she thought this, she told herself, the more likely it was that it would one day be true. The fact that this didn’t make any kind of rational sense didn’t particularly bother her; that wasn’t really the point.

Once, she tabulated all the men she had had this whole extended thought process about—actually, she had made a spreadsheet—and it was so long she had wound up deleting it. She would remember them all anyway, she figured, better not to have documentary evidence. Her memory, her mother had often said, in the impressed tone of mothers who are have produced daughters of superior intellect, was like a steel trap. (Later, when she thought about telling the story about the gymnasium in Colorado—not to anybody in particular, because she didn’t have anybody to tell it to who wouldn’t use it to stab her in the back, but just in general—she would realize she couldn’t remember the name of the town. She hated getting old.)

It was, of course, impossible to say which of them saw the other first, but as far as she could recall she and Jeanine, the other aide from the Porter campaign, were at the caucus site first, and had been for a while—it was their last of the evening, and Jeanine was running on fumes, and also maybe some kind of illegal substance Amy didn’t want to know _anything_ about—when the Kasinski people swooped in and started making a ruckus. She heard him, actually, before she saw him—heard his annoying, ingratiating voice. “Who are you thinking of voting for today, ma’am?” he said, in what she privately thought of as “DC voice”—nobody talked like that anywhere else on the planet—and when she turned to look she saw the old lady he was talking to before she saw him. He was sickeningly attractive. He was actually so attractive that it was, paradoxically, kind of reassuring; she could be comfortable assuming that he was a jerk. Nobody that good-looking was nice. Somebody had probably scientifically proven it as fact.

The old lady told him that she had been thinking about Nichols but then had switched her mind to Porter, she thought, and Amy listened (and watched, kind of) as he managed to talk her around into deciding on Kasinski inside of three minutes without breaking the law, and then realized she should probably be doing her job, and went back to “helping” out the obviously independent and informed citizens of whatever the fuck the town was called, whose opinions she had not and was not in any way influencing. Caucuses, she thought, were a fucking joke. But it didn’t matter, because, as she had been told countless times over the past seven months, legitimacy didn’t actually matter, as long as the board posted results.

“Are they endorsing fraud?” she’d asked Jeanine, who was on her second election cycle, and had looked at her sideways.

“No, Amy,” she’d said. “Nobody would ever endorse _fraud_. We endorse _strategic campaigning_.”

“Right,” Amy said, and decided to stop asking questions.

When the voters actually got to have their say, as voters inevitably had to do, she wound up leaning against a wall drinking some strange fizzy drink Jeanine had forced on her that tasted like carbonated cough syrup and watching everything happen, supposedly to make sure nothing untoward happened, which seemed unlikely in a room full of mostly middle-aged women. She started when the man from earlier suddenly appeared next to her, leaning against the wall opportunistically, like some kind of lothario.

“You’re one of the Porter people,” he said, and she shrugged.

“You’re going to win this district,” he said confidently, turning slightly and leaning at a different angle, which somehow made him seem less gross and more exhausted. “We’re going to win the other one though. Wherever we just came from. Fuck. I don’t know where anywhere’s called anymore. I’ve been to twenty-three different towns in the past two days. Twenty-five? I have no idea.”

“Nichols is winning the state anyway,” she said, taking another sip of whatever vile thing she was drinking, and he let out a little huff of laughter. She should probably have kept up her game face, especially in front of what Jeanine liked to call an enemy operative, but she was just too tired. Plus, it was true.

“Yeah, well, Nichols spent half of last month giving speeches heavily implying he’d definitely legalize marijuana if he got elected,” the guy said. “As if he could get that through Congress. Every stoner in Boulder who can be bothered’s gonna go out and caucus for him, if they have their clocks set right.”

“Nobody has clocks anymore,” she pointed out, and he grinned.

“Touché.”

“How can you tell we’re going to win here?” she asked, because she was exhausted enough that she had apparently gone insane.

He shrugged. “Can’t you tell from talking to people? There’s a mood in the room. Plus we were canvassing yesterday and nobody—I am telling you, _nobody_ —would talk to us. They shut the door on _this_ face.” He pointed at himself. “Would you shut the door on this face?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You wouldn’t,” he said, smirking, “you’re talking to me,” which was worryingly fair.

“Also,” he said, “if Nichols gets knocked out, his people probably go to you, don’t you think?”

“If he gets knocked out in the first round—”

“He will, he’s doing even worse, he’s a fucking hippie—”

She paused. “Sure, I guess. If _you_ get knocked out first—”

“Still to you,” he said. “You’re closest to the middle.”

“I guess we’re getting the nomination, then,” she said, raising an eyebrow, even though they definitely weren’t. Porter had started cloistering himself away on the plane, rumor had it, or on the bus, when he was on it, and not talking to anybody; he’d won Iowa and been fading fast ever since. The guy was smirking again.

“No, you aren’t,” he said. “You know that as well as I do.”

“Fuck off,” she muttered. “You aren’t either. Nobody wants to vote for the Unabomber.”

“Nobody wants to vote for a dirty San Francisco hippie, either,” he pointed out.

“So you think they’ll go with the undercover conservative instead of the solid centrist candidate?” she asked, and he made an exaggerated noise of protest.

“I take offense at your impugning of my candidate in this fashion,” he said. “Also, it’s not like Porter was much better on Foreign Affairs.”

“I know,” she said with a sigh, and he grinned. He was very pretty when he smiled. She hated pretty men. They were the worst kind of men, except for politicians.

“Shit,” he muttered, “gotta run,” and then was dashing across the room toward a very annoyed middle-aged man who was waving him down. She took another sip of her drink, which was turning warm, and made a face.

He was right; they won the caucus, which wasn’t good for much of anything; Nichols got 43% of the vote and their share was a measly 19%, and it didn’t matter anyway because they got slaughtered in the South. The guy, whatever his name was, had been right; Kasinski’s terrible name and the fact that he was from fucking Staten Island apparently didn’t matter. He didn’t have any objectionable opinions, if you were a certain kind of person, and he had a Bill Clinton kind of charm that strongly suggested to her that he had an entire closet full of skeletons, except that he went on and on about how wonderful his amazing wife was all the time, and his wife was also charming and adored him.

It was, frankly, inevitable, particularly considering the fact that his wife was from Alabama and had spent the past two months practically living at homey events across the South, full of middle-aged black women to whom she listened with an endlessly sympathetic ear without actually promising them anything concrete, doing things like baking and stocking food pantries and working at soup kitchens and fucking quilting. They’d tried, of course, to run dozens of hit pieces on how pandering it was—who the fuck _quilted_? Mary Kasinski, apparently, who had once _won a competitive quilting competition_ in her youth—but nobody wanted to hear it. She was beloved. The quilts were going to children in need. Nobody wanted William Porter, Jr., he of Serious Policy Positions and three-and-a-half terms in the Senate, and a wife who couldn’t talk in public if she wasn’t on Valium. If only they had bothered to have cute kids, who could then have had cute kids of their own, Amy thought sometimes, despairingly, but they were also childless, which was honestly the final nail in the coffin. (So were the Kasinskis, but Mary Kasinski had done a whole PSA on infertility that had even made Jeanine cry. “She could have adopted if she wanted a kid that bad,” Amy had pointed out, and everyone had looked at her like she was a monster.)

She was going to need another job.

Everybody had gone home except for the lingering press and haggard aides, who were lined up against the side of the school smoking—a lot of people seemed to be smoking these days—so she was standing out in the parking lot fucking around with her phone. The emails were coming thick and fast. Porter, of course, wanted to stay in for another two weeks. He’d come in second, he was apparently saying, in all the Southern states. The emails she was getting about this suggested that at least three people on his campaign staff were about to have an aneurysm.

“Hey,” the guy from earlier said, walking up to her. His jacket was flapping around his legs in the wind, which was also ruffling his hair. Later, he would keep it cut shorter, but she would always privately think it looked nice longer, though not as robotically perfect. His suit was kind of shitty, too. She was wearing a puffy down jacket that went down to her knees to ward off the cold and her hair was in a ponytail. She had always worn her hair in a ponytail then; she hadn’t known what else to do with it.

“Hey,” she said, frowning, and looked down at her Keds. “Get comfortable shoes for this shit,” her supervisor had told her months before. “Or else you are gonna wind up with serious orthopedic problems when you hit forty. Thirty-five.”

“You almost won Massachusetts,” he said cheerfully. “Lost by a hair.”

“Shut up,” she muttered.

“I’m not gloating,” he said, although he was clearly gloating. “I have no preference, personally. I want my candidate to win for purely competitive reasons.”

“If that was supposed to make me feel better, it didn’t work,” she told him. “It just made you seem callous.”

“If you thought that made me seem callous, you are in the wrong business,” he told her. “Or haven’t met anybody in _this_ business.” He paused for a second, and then tilted his head consideringly. “How old are you, anyway?”

“You aren’t supposed to ask a woman that,” she sniped, pretending to look at her phone, although she wasn’t actually reading anything on it. He snorted.

“You are not old enough to give a shit about your age,” he said. “That’s for thirty-somethings who want to pretend they’re still young.”

“Thirty-something isn’t old,” she said, and he just looked at her.

“When you’re thirty-five you’re not going to think you’re old,” she said, in a rare moment of prescience, and then nervously tucked some loose strands of hair behind her ears. “I’m twenty-three.” _Barely_ , she didn’t add. Her birthday had been weeks before, on the campaign bus. They lower-level staffers had bought her a cheap grocery store cake and sung happy birthday in the middle of the night after a campaign rally, all very off-key, and eaten it with their hands before passing out. Nobody had gotten drunk but it had been one of the more disgusting mornings-after of her life to date.

His face softened for a moment, which she would later conveniently forget; she could already tell it was out-of-character.

“You graduate last year?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, and then stood up a little straighter and asked, “How old are _you_?”

“Twenty-six,” he said, sounding slightly amused. “Which is why I’m on Kasinski’s campaign and you’re on Porter’s.”

“You’re standing in a high school parking lot in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere in Colorado, where you knew you were going to lose,” she replied, spreading her arms wide. “You are not important.”

“Neither are you,” he said. “Want to get drunk?”

“ _Please_ ,” she said, and he whistled as he flipped his car keys around his finger. There was a bounce in his step as he led her across the parking lot to one of the beat-up cars scattered at the back of the school that she considered personally offensive, so she looked away and started to text Jeanine instead.

“Hang on,” she said. “Don’t you have a boss, or something? Isn’t this his car?”

“Nope,” the guy said. “I was out earlier knocking on doors. This fine, fine rental is all mine.”

She stopped a few feet away from the car as he unlocked it and opened the driver-side door. “What if you’re about to abduct and rape me,” she said. “And then throw me down a gorge.”

“We aren’t near any gorges,” he said. “I’d have to have a way better plan for disposing the body.”

“That is the least reassuring thing you could possibly have said to me in response to that question,” she told him, and he shrugged.

“I’m really not that kind of asshole,” he said, and for whatever insane and stupid reason, she believed him, and got in the car. He wasn’t, fortunately, that kind of asshole, but in hindsight, she couldn’t in all honesty say that it hadn’t been a terrible mistake all the same.

 

*

 

Whatever armpit of a town they’d been not-caucusing in didn’t have a bar, but Dan—his name was Dan, it turned out—had already scoped one out in the next town over, and when they got there it was practically bursting with journalists and staffers trying to get hammered as quickly as possible. The bartender looked like he’d never seen this many people in one place before, let alone in his own bar. Amy wondered if he was going to run out of booze. Anything was possible.

Somehow Dan managed to both commandeer them a table and get the bartender’s attention within minutes of them walking through the door, which Amy found suspicious, though when he came back with her cosmo in one hand and a beer in the other she wasn’t exactly about to complain. (Later, she’d stop drinking anything but whiskey at bars. She was very young.) “Here you go,” he said, sliding it across the table, and she practically stuck her face down into the glass before she remembered to thank him. He started laughing.

“What are you going to look like in an hour?” he mused out loud, and she gave him the finger. “Oh, look at you.”

The TV was on CNN. Wolf Blitzer was saying that the results were “very, very serious” for Porter. Amy wanted to punch him in the face, through the television. “I’m going to need to find another job,” she said mournfully, and Dan turned to look at the TV.

“Yep,” he said, and she leaned down and rested her head on her hands.

“A presidential campaign will look good on your resume,” he said, which she knew was supposed to make her feel better, but he didn’t sound like he was very used to trying to make people feel better. She wondered if he was just trying to get in her pants. Or: she assumed that he was trying to get into her pants; she couldn’t tell exactly how fast he thought he was going to succeed. She hated when people pretended to be nice; honest meanness was so much less aggravating.

“‘A presidential campaign will look good on your resume,’” she muttered under her breath, in a rude voice. “Wow, thanks.”

When she snuck a glance over at him he looked unfazed. “Obviously, mine will look better,” he said. “But you’re only twenty-three, you’ll be fine. Just get a job on some House reelection campaign make yourself indispensible.”

“Thank you for that sage and wise advice,” she said. “I’ll look up ‘making myself indispensible’ on Wikipedia, I’m sure it’s a piece of cake.”

“Drink up,” he said, “this is going to be a long night.”

“Why,” she asked, when she had nearly gotten to the bottom of her glass, and was feeling slightly less terrible, “did you pick Kasinski? How could you tell?”

“That he was going to win?” Dan said. “I couldn’t. I applied everywhere and he was who hired me. I got lucky.”

“So you applied with us and didn’t get a job,” Amy said, briefly feeling better.

“No, Kasinski offered me a job first,” he corrected. “And then more money.” He paused. “Not much more.”

She scowled. “So you didn’t care about his policies, and it wasn’t some—clairvoyant mumbo jumbo—”

“Nope,” he said, sounding quite sanguine. “Obviously, I’ll be telling everybody else I saw it coming from a mile away.”

“Why not me?” she asked. She still sort of felt like he might throw her in his trunk. She was being taken in by his stupid fucking face, she thought. It was bad to get involved with men who looked like that. Her mother had told her that repeatedly over the years; she assumed there was a story there that she didn’t really wanted to know.

“Because,” he said, raising one eyebrow and lifting his glass to his mouth, “I have never met you before, and I don’t think it really matters.”

“Ugh,” she said, as he finished his drink, correctly taking this comment to mean, _You don’t matter_.

“I am in this racket for purely self-interested reasons,” he said, straightening up a little and trying to make himself look important, she thought unconsciously. “I want to be somebody’s chief of staff before I’m old enough that I won’t enjoy it. Nobody has principles doing this. You have to hitch your cart to the right horse. Besides, I could write you a book on what’s wrong with each one of them, so what does it matter?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. He looked very pleased with himself. “Did you interview for jobs with the Republican candidates?” she asked, and he immediately looked shiftier, and young again.

“No,” he said, “what do you take me for. I have _some_ principles.”

“Hmm,” she hummed, tipping back her glass.

“Give me that,” he said, and went to get refills.

When he came back she had her head on her hand and was staring morosely at the electoral map on the television screen. “You can’t stare at that all night,” he said, and tugged on her ponytail after he put the drinks down. She started. “Switch places.”

She scowled again but moved over to his seat and he slid into hers, settling back against her puffy jacket. She squirmed around in the warm spot a little and distracted herself with her drink.

“Where’d you go to college?” he asked.

“Wellesley,” she said, and he laughed.

“What?” she said, confrontationally. “What’s so funny about that?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just… exactly what I would have guessed. If I had bothered to make a guess.”

“I liked Wellesley,” she muttered, although actually college had been kind of a nightmare. “What about you?”

“Georgetown,” he said, and gave her a look that suggested this should have been obvious.

“Well, fine,” she said. “Congratulations.”

“Are you from Massachusetts?” he asked.

“No. Virginia,” she said. “You know. DC. Ish.” They had always rooted for Georgetown in the NCAA but she didn’t mention this; she didn’t want to give him an inch. She had applied there and not gotten in and was still bitter about it, although she had also desperately wanted to escape her family, so probably it had all worked out for the best.

“Ah,” he said. “Your parents—?” He gestured illustratively, and she shook her head, shuddering slightly.

“My mom’s a receptionist at a middle school and my dad’s an accountant,” she said. “My sister isn’t registered to vote. I’m the anomaly.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” he said, leaning his head against his hand and leveling her with an uncomfortable, evaluating gaze.

“What, is your dad some bigshot judge or something?”

He looked odd for a moment. “No. Nothing like that.”

“Where are _you_ from, then?” she asked.

“Connecticut,” he said, and she snickered. He looked offended.

“Sorry,” she said. “You just look exactly like somebody who would be from Connecticut. You look like what people from Connecticut… are.”

He leaned back and looked at her through half-closed eyes. “Rich and WASPy,” he clarified.

“Yes,” she said.

“I’m Catholic,” he said smugly, and then laughed at what she was sure was her expression of horror. “What, you hate Catholics?”

“No,” she said, and just managed to stop herself saying something about how plenty of her best friends growing up had been Catholic. “You just—”

“Don’t worry, I’m lapsed,” he said. “Emphatically.”

“Do you still go to church with your parents on Christmas?” she asked, and he made a face.

“Yes,” he said. “I don’t want to give my mother a stroke.”

“Aww,” she said. “How sweet.”

“I did grow up in Greenwich, though,” he said, and she gagged.

“I can’t believe you’re bragging about being from _Greenwich_ ,” she said, disgusted, but he just continued to look smug.

“At least I didn’t grow up playing polo,” he offered, which was fair.

“Well, I grew up with normal people,” she said. “Like—” She looked around the bar. “Well, not the people in here. But. The people _around_.”

“The good people of Colorado?” he said sardonically.

“ _Right_ ,” she said, although she’d been in Colorado five days and found canvassing unbearable.

“You know, I’d never been anywhere until I did this job,” he said thoughtfully, tapping his fingers. “The rest of the country, I mean. I had a job working on a campaign in Delaware a couple years ago. But like, fucking Iowa—come on. Nobody goes to Iowa.”

“Nobody,” she agreed. “I never want to go to Iowa again.”

“Well, you’ve signed yourself up for a lifetime of Iowas,” he said, and when she sighed, he leaned in slightly, looking conspiratorial. “Look. Here’s the thing. Everybody says it’s so inspirational, right? To get to see the great American fabric or whatever the fuck. We are so diverse and yet united.” His eyes were bright and, she thought, slightly wicked. “But—fuck those people. What the fuck do I want to do with Arkansas? You give me the east coast and California and I am set for life. I do not need to talk to any of rest of these motherfucking idiots ever again.”

She started to giggle. For a moment, she could tell that he couldn’t tell whether he’d fucked up, and then he started to grin again, slowly this time.

“I know,” she said, sounding slightly hysterical. “I don’t ever want to talk to another fucking person anywhere in my whole life.” She might, she thought, have a problem that went beyond politics. Also, she was probably in the wrong profession.

“It’s a con,” he said, quietly, straight in her ear. “The whole thing’s a con. Nobody actually likes all of these people. If they’re from the South they hate the snobby New England fucks, if they’re from New England they hate literally everybody else, if they’re from California they constitutionally think the rest of us are miserable assholes. You just have to trick everybody into thinking you give a shit about them. That’s how you win.”

“I am really bad at pretending to care about things,” she said. She had only had one and a half drinks, she thought. She should not have been this inebriated. Then she tried to remember the last time she’d eaten.

“Well,” he said, leaning back in his seat, “you’re probably better off not being a politician, then.”

She was, she realized, leaning forward on the table, and hurriedly leaned back. He was smirking slightly but she thought that might just be what his face looked like naturally. He was exactly the sort of boy her mother would tell her to run the hell away from, probably while screaming. If he asked her to go back to whatever shitty motel he was staying in she would say no but only because she was supposed to, and also because she was afraid, a little, in an abstract and nebulous way, of him—but no, not of _him_ , exactly. She remembered getting on the buses to parties at Harvard in college, when her friends forced her to go, and standing in the corner hating everything about it except for the one or two times she’d gone home with a guy, out of a grim kind of sense of obligation. It had been all right, sometimes, she guessed. College guys were terrible at sex. Maybe all guys were terrible at sex. She’d had a boyfriend in high school, sort of, but they’d mostly been distracted by standardized tests and hadn’t gotten very far as far as fooling around went. She thought he might be gay now; it was hard to tell on Facebook.

“Don’t look so sad,” he said, and when she looked up at him, startled, he looked amused, but not in a mean way. “Most politicians lose. We don’t have to stay with them.”

“I know,” she said. “I didn’t even really like him. _Don’t_. I just, you know. Don’t know what I’m going to do now.”

“Hustle,” he said with a shrug, but this time without smirking. She’d forget this, later, too.

He bought her a couple more drinks until she was truly hammered, just short of the point where she was in danger of embarrassing herself to an extreme degree, and then they walked out into the cold parking lot, laughing. She fuzzily wondered whether he’d invite her back to where he was staying and some part of her was petrified that he would, but he just opened the car door for her, grinning, and said, “Where to, madam?” and took her there without fuss. But when she got out (actually, he got out and around and opened the door for her while she was unbuckling her seatbelt, which she _would_ later remember because it was so wildly out of character that it seemed literally impossible) he asked her if he could get her number, which she fumblingly recited and he then dutifully typed into his Blackberry. (It was the era of Blackberries.) She stood blushing and tugging on random bits of her hair to keep her hands occupied and when he looked up he was smiling and kind of smirking and it was all probably an awful idea, but when was she ever even going to see him? The only guys she’d met in the last six months were all on Porter’s campaign and all of them were mouth-breathers. It was nice to receive attention from a pretty guy every once in a while. He was probably never even going to text her. He probably picked up girls at every campaign stop.

But to her surprise he did text her, from all over the country—sometimes she thought he just liked having someone to listen to his complaints and overthought humorous comments, but she didn’t really mind being that person, since she was at home doing nothing but going on increasingly long runs around the Basin and watching television in her pajamas while sending off job application after job application after job application—and then when Kasinski et al finally careened through DC again, to vote on some doomed-to-fail gun control bill—Dan, apparently, had been promoted to an occasional part of the official entourage, although it still didn’t sound like he was had _spoken_ to The Candidate yet—he took her on a real date, and they spent three days fucking and arguing about Kasinski’s chances against Miller. She’d spent a week cleaning her apartment in preparation and they trashed it within six hours and she didn’t even care. Fucking a pretty guy was even better than just receiving attention from one, especially if you liked him, even if he was probably a terrible person, especially if it seemed like he liked you back.

And then she got a job on some Ohio senator’s reelection campaign, since some sociopathic right-winger was mounting a highly popular assault on uteri and also gay people, and Dan managed to get himself a plumb position in Kasinski’s Ohio office, and for a while Amy went to bed thinking mostly about Ohio voter demographics by district but also about what might happen after the election, when the country stopped going insane and everybody moved back to DC, and felt almost happy for the first time—ever?

“That’s wonderful, dear,” her mother said, and she smushed her face into her pillow.

Of course, then it turned out Dan was a lizard in human form, and Kasinski lost the electoral college in a landslide, and she blocked his number and didn’t speak to him for a decade. So, things didn’t really work out as planned, but then, as her mother told her when she was crying to her on the phone about it—the one and only time this ever happened in her life—they rarely do, sweetheart. They rarely do.

 

 

 **II.**  


_Shall quips, and sentences, and these paper bullets of the brain, awe a man from the career of his humour? No; the world must be peopled. When I said, I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married._

— _Much Ado About Nothing_ , William Shakespeare

 

Like many of the country’s devout atheists, Dan Egan had grown up spending all of his Sunday mornings in church, kicking the pew in front of him and wishing he were elsewhere. But despite the fact that he had, upon arriving at college, immediately declared to his roommate (who hadn’t been interested) that he was never going to church again, his mind had retained a certain Catholic fixation on hell that would have surprised almost everybody who knew him. Dan was not afraid of hell—religion was a joke and the Catholic Church more so—and believed with a deep certainty that when he died his body was going to be nothing more than a lump of meat tossed into the ground; what he did in-between now and then was, therefore, of little ethical consequence. But he enjoyed extreme circumstances and so hell, as a system, or maybe simply as an image, appealed to him.

He had spent, that is, much of his adult life constructing elaborate fantasies of what hell would look like not only to himself but also (especially) to other people: what would, he often thought snidely to himself, hell be like for Gary? Probably just running and running and running after Selina without ever being able to reach her, with an increasingly heavy bag weighing down his shoulder. Gary was a Sisyphean figure. For a while he’d thought Selina’s hell would be wandering through featureless White House corridors trying to find presidential meetings to which she hadn’t been invited, but then he decided it was probably actually just being stuck alone in a room with Catherine for eternity.

Anyway, he’d entertained all kinds of ideas about the worst possible thing he could imagine enduring, but it wasn’t long into his tenure at Selina’s office that he decided, with a deeper sense of conviction than he felt about most things, that it was definitely being stuck somewhere—anywhere—with Jonah Ryan, without means of escape.

The puzzling thing about Jonah was that, even after Dan had explicitly told him what he thought of him (nothing good) and revealed his brief overtures of friendship to have been a charade, it still did kind of seem, for a while, that Jonah would have fallen for the same stupid trick a second time. Jonah was just so _pathetic_. He wanted somebody to be a man with so _badly_. Dan would have been flattered if he could have just kicked him to the curb, literally or metaphorically; unfortunately, Jonah refused to be kicked anywhere, and like a bad penny kept appearing, and appearing, and appearing again. Actually, if you physically kicked him he would probably just come back for more; women kicking him might even turn him on. It was impossible to even begin to imagine what went on in that diseased mind of his and Dan didn’t want to even try to guess. Dan, of course, was in no position to question anybody’s decisions on, really, anything, but this didn’t stop him from judging Jonah on even hypothetical bases. He didn’t feel bad about it. Jonah deserved to be judged.

He couldn’t remember now when exactly the conversation about Amy had happened; they had been trapped alone in a car somewhere, stuck in motorcade traffic hell. The upside of being alone in a car with Jonah was that he wasn’t in a car with Selina having a heart attack about being stuck in traffic (which was not supposed to _happen_ ); the downside was everything else about being alone in a car with Jonah. Dan didn’t know the driver’s name (this, he reflected, had been a strategic misstep) but he was considering rolling down the partition anyway and trying small talk. He was very good at small talk. Jonah wasn’t.

Instead he was staring down at his phone, trying to pretend Jonah wasn’t there; Jonah could not stand people ignoring him and so would not shut the fuck up. Dan had been doing a good job of tuning him out until he started talking about Amy, and then his head, unbidden, as if pulled by a marionette string, jerked up and away from the increasingly insignificant emails he had been reduced to reading.

“What?” he said.

“I said, the two of you used to be an item,” Jonah said, with the expression he often had that suggested immense knowledge of something inappropriate for children. There was never any way of accurately intuiting whether or not he was full of shit when he made proclamations like this. Sometimes Dan wasn’t sure whether or not _Jonah_ knew he was full of shit. “A little ménage-a-deux, am I right?”

Dan stared at him. “That means nothing,” he said. “That isn’t a thing.”

“That’s what you think,” Jonah said, smirking, and slouched back slightly further in his seat, his long legs spread out in front of him. Dan fantasized for a moment about shoving his foot up into his balls. “So you’re not denying it?”

“Me and Amy?” Dan said, looking back down at his phone. “No, you’re full of shit.”

“That’s not what my little bird told me,” Jonah said, looking so gleeful Dan wondered whether he actually knew something; it was, however, difficult to imagine who on earth could have been spreading Ohio gossip from twelve years previous. Of the aides Dan had worked with during that election, around five percent were still in politics, and those five percent had not been paying any attention to the blonde girl he fucked for a few months.

He jabbed at something on his phone. This was stupid: of course people knew. Everybody knew the two of them had some kind of vague connection and that it had something to do with sex and that it hadn’t worked out, and there was no way there wasn’t at least one person who _actually_ knew the details, and if one person did then so did somebody else. But the fact of the matter was, no matter what he liked to think, they just weren’t important enough for anybody to care. If he and Amy started fucking in White House supply closets _now_ — _that_ would make the news. But that was a different question altogether.

“Jonah,” he said. “Your preadolescent turd brain can’t think about anything other than sex for more than three minutes. Some of us are actually capable of doing our jobs.”

“I bet she’s really good in bed,” Jonah said, still looking pleased with himself. “Right? I bet she gets really _nasty_. Does she talk dirty? I can just imagine—”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Dan asked before he could go any further. Despite the fact that everybody in the office was an idiot—except for Amy, he loyally amended, who was a control freak perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but not stupid—he did actually like his job, sort of, and more importantly didn’t want to get fired, since that would make him significantly less employable in the future. So it would be better to just shut Jonah up now before he actually punched him in the face.

The car crawled forward a foot, maybe two.

“We’re just two guys, talking mano a mano,” Jonah said, gesturing between them. “We’re getting into the ladies. I know you’ve been there with Miss Brookheimer. I’m just looking for some tips.”

“You are out of your mind,” Dan said. “You are literally out of your mind. You are delusional.”

Jonah blinked, and then smirked again. He was always smirking. Dan didn’t think he’d ever seen him not smirking, except, of course, when he looked like he was about to piss himself, which was around half the time. “You still want to get in there, don’t you,” he said, and Dan leaned his head back and looked at the car ceiling. “You still want to—”

“We are not having this conversation,” Dan said. “We are not talking about this.”

“Well, _Dan_ ,” Jonah said, “everybody knows that you only sleep with women if they’re useful to you. _Professionally_. I sleep with women— _lots_ of women—because I _want_ to, not out of self-interest—”

“I’d say that sounds pretty self-interested,” Dan muttered, and Jonah ignored him.

“—And that’s why they like me,” he continued. “That’s why they all want a piece of this bad boy.” He gestured, and Dan closed his eyes, but immediately found that was the wrong thing to have done.

“At least I know how to have sex with a human woman, Jonah,” he said. “And at least they like it.”

“So you say,” Jonah said, and Dan groaned.

“My _point_ ,” he continued, “is that if you missed your shot with Amy by using her in this— _opportunistic_ manner, then you gotta let the rest of us have a turn. You don’t own her body, Dan. You don’t own her _spirit_.”

“Jonah,” Dan said. “If you don’t stop talking right now, I am going to kick your teeth in.”

“I’m too tall for you to reach,” Jonah said, sounding victorious, and Dan, feeling like a child but unable to resist, stomped with all his might on his foot. The resulting noise was even worse than he’d been expecting—so bad, in fact, that the driver rolled down the partition.

“Everything’s fine here, sir,” Dan said, smiling broadly. “Thank you for your attentiveness.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to be able to hear through that,” Jonah choked.

“It was quite loud, sir,” the driver said, and rolled it back up. When they got out of the car, Dan watched with satisfaction as Jonah hobbled away.

“What did you do to him?” Amy asked, coming up beside him and looking impressed.

“I was defending your honor,” he told her, plastering on his best shit-eating grin, and she just looked at him with an expression of vague disgust before Selina shouted for her and they both hurried over to deal with whatever non-crisis was arising.

 

*

 

It was now effectively true that Dan only slept with women when it was politically expedient to do so, and also true that he had essentially allowed people to erroneously draw the conclusion that this was how he and Amy knew each other, although this was not, of course, the case; Amy Brookheimer, at age twenty-three, a recently unemployed staffer of an unsuccessful presidential election campaign, had not been a politically expedient choice at all. She had just been a choice. She was somebody who had been around at the time. They had happened to be at the same caucus site, and everybody else had been middle-aged or ugly. It wasn’t exactly hard to put two and two together.

Amy had not technically been the last person Dan had slept with just because he felt like it; _technically_ , there had been somebody after, but Dan was pretty sure that “a girl you picked up at a party while drunk and dangerously depressed about breaking up with somebody” didn’t really count. Since then he’d maintained a policy of non-engagement, emotionally, and his life had improved exponentially, although the result of this pattern of behavior was that he had left a trail of burned bridges behind him that would have impressed even the most inveterate of playboys. Some men, he knew, could sleep around and not manage to alienate the women they slept with; he was not one of them. He just couldn’t be bothered to learn how to do it. Still, it had gotten him to the vice president’s office, so all he needed now was the final push. And then what would it matter how many people scattered across the city thought he was—as one girl years ago had memorably described him—a rat-faced cunt? He would have won.

It hadn’t started off as a grand strategy for his entire life, of course; it had just sort of happened. But then: how it had worked! He did sometimes feel a little bad for them, but only in a distant way, as if it were all happening to somebody else, especially now that he had perfected the art of ditching them without actually having to look them in the eye, or even speak to them; text messages, he often thought, were an incredible innovation. Earlier on he had allowed himself to get caught up in the whole drama of breaking up with people, which was stupid because he’d never _really_ been dating them in the first place, and if they were too stupid to see this then _he_ didn’t feel too bad about making _them_ feel bad. That was just how the game was played.

His biggest error had been some years earlier, when some girl had tricked him into admitting his strategy—an amateur mistake, which he never again repeated. It had been, he later rationalized, a learning experience. Also, Anna was now a US attorney; so really, it hadn’t been his fault that she’d managed to nail him to the wall.

“So you’re telling me,” she’d said slowly, incredulously, “that you’ve been sleeping with me just to… further your career?”

“Well, you’re also hot,” he said, he thought quite fairly. She _was_ hot, though not _bombshell_ hot, which in his mind was an important distinction. “You seem like a pretty nice person. But I’m not really looking for all of that, no.”

She stared at him. “You’re a sociopath,” she said. “Oh my god. You are a fucking sociopath.”

“I’m telling you the truth!” he protested. “I’m being totally honest with you! There are lots of hot girls I _could_ sleep with, why not choose one who’s useful—”

She put her hands over her face for a moment, though he was pretty sure she wasn’t crying, or that _upset_ , exactly; it seemed like she was trying not to scream. “So, what,” she said, once she’d removed her hands, “if _nobody_ were useful to you, _then_ you’d fuck whoever you wanted?”

He paused for a moment and actually thought about this. “No, I’d probably just jerk off more,” he said, quite seriously. He liked sex, but he liked his job—and more importantly, the potential for future, better jobs—more, and so he was content enough to just jerk off more for stretches of time to make up for not having time to actually fuck anybody. It got the job done the same in the end either way, he figured.

“Oh my god,” Anna was muttering. “So you could just masturbate forever with nobody to actually get you off, and be totally happy with that?”

“No, every six months or so I like to actually sleep with someone,” he said. “Minimum. But it’s not a hard-and-fast rule.”

“You,” she said definitively, “are a fucking maniac. If I could leave a review of you somewhere online warning other women off of you I would. I hope nobody ever touches your dick again.”

“Well, you have a nice day, too,” he said as she stormed out of his apartment, somewhat affronted.

That night he’d jerked off in bed and sighed afterward, looking at the ceiling. It was better with somebody else, but if you had somebody else you had to actually _date_ her, and he didn’t have time for that shit. Now everybody was all over fuckbuddies, as a concept, but he knew that was bullshit; you could not get into that with any woman, he thought darkly, without it going horribly wrong. You started seeing a woman—fucking her, dating her, whatever; it all turned into the same thing eventually—and then she wanted to get married and then even if you claimed you were going to be childless wonders eventually you somehow wound up with kids you had to pay for and pretend to be interested in, and Dan was not going to fucking let that happen to him. He was not that kind of idiot. It was much, much easier to just jerk off in the shower in the morning, and bypass women altogether, if necessary, than wind up with accidental children. He didn’t even hate children, exactly. He just did not want to actually have to feed them, or speak to them, or—god— _play_ with them, let alone deal with all the Little League and school play bullshit. It wasn’t happening.

Someday, of course, he would have to get married. He was aware of this, in an academic sense; while there wasn’t any explicit reason why he couldn’t continue on doing what he was doing single, at a certain point there were social benefits to being married that it would be foolish to bypass. Still, even though he was thirty-eight and nearly all of his friends from college were married now—and most had kids already (some of whom were already doing Little League and starring in school plays, based on Facebook), and some were already divorced—it seemed like a distant hypothetical to him, something that he didn’t really need to worry about. His life, though frequently in a state of turmoil, did not currently seem to require some kind of essential feminine balancing influence. What would that even look like? Some senator’s blonde country club daughter? He’d shoot himself first.

Plus, as time had passed he’d perfected the art of dating women for short periods of time, getting what he needed out of them, and then ditching them via text, which had taken a considerable amount of work, and wasn’t a skill to be thrown away lightly. Everybody was always very impressed, in a horrified way, by this; Dan was unrepentant. Dating was always transactional; he was just making the subtext text.

He explained this to Amy once while very drunk at the office, in the middle of the night, when they were technically supposed to be working but had burned themselves out, and she said, “You are such an asshole that you’ve developed philosophical positions justifying how much of an asshole you are. That’s like, advanced asshole. Level five asshole.”

“I’m _right_ ,” he protested.

“You’re a dick,” she told him. “I hope you have blue balls for the rest of your life.” Through the haze of the liquor he considered whether this would be worse than being stuck in a car with Jonah forever. He thought, on par, he would take the blue balls.

“Somebody will always sleep with me,” he said. “I’m too attractive.”

She made a face. “I know,” she said. “Somebody needs to throw acid at you or something to teach you humility.”

“Don’t joke about that,” he said. “That’s serious. Think of how sad you’d be if somebody ruined this face.” He mugged at her.

“I’d have to deal with Gary and Selina pretending they weren’t freaked out every time they looked at you,” Amy agreed, “so yeah, that would suck.”

“Uh huh,” Dan said. “That’s what you tell yourself.”

“You are the most annoying person in the world,” she said. “I can’t believe I ever slept with you. I was such an idiot in my twenties.”

“I am not the most annoying person in the world,” he automatically replied. “The most annoying person in the world is Jonah.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Jonah is more annoying than you are.”

“If you had to pick between the two of us,” he said. “If a nuclear apocalypse came—”

“There isn’t going to be a _nuclear apocalypse_ —”

“ _If it came_ —me and Jonah—who do you pick.” He waited attentively.

“Neither,” she said. “We all die of radiation poisoning.”

“Invalid,” he replied. “You have to pick one.”

“Says who?” she said, and he shrugged.

“Me,” he said. She rolled her eyes.

“ _Obviously_ I would sleep with you before Jonah,” she said. “But I would sleep with anyone before Jonah, literally. I would sleep with _Gary_.” Her face twisted, as though she’d eaten something sour. “I never want to think about that again.”

“Me neither,” he said, and didn’t harass her about whether she’d sleep with him or Gary, if pressed. The answer was clear. Instead he just poured them both another drink (miraculously, without spilling any on the rug), and then they both passed out in the office and woke up to the sight of Sue looking down at them, distinctly unimpressed.

“Good morning,” she said. “Please go copulate elsewhere.”

Dan thought about telling her they hadn’t been copulating, but his tongue was too dry to speak, and anyway, he didn’t really mind people thinking they were screwing. Maybe it would have a humanizing effect on his reputation, which was, he freely admitted, pretty terrible.

He looked over at Amy, who was trying (and failing) to pull hair out of her mouth. He reached over and tugged, and she spat out the last piece.

“Thanks,” she croaked, and put her hand directly on his head when she stood up, pushing him down to the ground, and then walking away, leaving him as if for dead.

“Thanks to you too,” he shouted after her, but she ignored him.

 

*

 

Jonah liked to complain that they all blamed everything that went on in the President’s office on him; whenever he started to go off on this subject, Dan liked to point out that this was objectively, _factually_ true. Obviously, it wasn’t, but it helped that Selina laid into him every time she saw him, as opposed to everybody else, who only got the brunt of her ire around half the time.

It often _felt_ like everything was Jonah’s fault, though, and this—this specific catastrophe—definitely, absolutely was, and Dan was going to murder him for it. He was going to put him through a woodchipper one malformed fucking limb at a time. And he’d make him fucking _watch_.

Jonah would later make the argument that it was really _Sue’s_ fault for going to her sister’s wedding instead of coming in on the weekend to wade through the comprehensive immigration bill; when he tried, Amy didn’t even bother arguing at him, just looked at him with an expression of such fury and disgust that he took a step backwards and sort of cringed, like he was afraid she might hit him. Amy could probably take Jonah in a fight, Dan reflected. He was a foot-and-a-half taller than she was but he’d probably start crying before she even hit him. And Amy would fight dirty.

Dan had been on the phone with Representative Fuentes’ chief aide, who was jacked up on caffeine and making calls to _other_ aides and sending them emails of updates to the draft every five minutes. He thought it was possible she was going to have a heart attack, although she was younger than he was; she was talking in double time and at around twice her normal volume. He thought about telling her that it really didn’t matter, because nobody was ever going to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and he wasn’t exactly sure why Selina was even bothering to try, except as a symbolic gesture, but he didn’t want to be responsible for indirectly taking a promising young woman’s life, so he kept his mouth shut.

When he got off the phone, he walked back in from the hall with his laptop under his arm, rubbing his eyes, to the sight of Jonah nervously talking to somebody on Sue’s phone.

“Yes,” he was saying, shifty-eyed, “she is—she is here—I could go—get her for you—”

Dan stared. There was only one “she” in the office, and that was Amy; Selina and Gary were off eating fried food with Normal Citizens somewhere, he didn’t fucking know or care where. He made an urgent slashing motion across his throat but Jonah was in too deep. “Yes, we could—we could give you all a whole tour,” he said. “It’s very—it’s pretty empty right now—”

Dan walked over and grabbed the phone out of his hand. “Excuse me,” he said into the receiver. “May I ask who’s calling?”

“Who are _you_?” a woman asked.

“I apologize, I don’t know what this—person told you, but he’s very confused about the current situation at the White House,” Dan said, trying to sound as authoritative as possible. Jonah wasn’t even glaring at him, which was weird, he was just kind of shaking his head. “We can’t accommodate any—”

“I know who you are,” the woman said suddenly. “You’re _Dan Egan_.” She didn’t sound happy about it.

“Um,” Dan said. “What?”

“You asshole,” the woman said, voice rising, “you tell Amy she fucked up this one—”

“Who _are_ you?” he asked.

“I’m her fucking _sister_ ,” she shouted. “And it’s her father’s _birthday_ today and she _didn’t show up_.”

“I see,” Dan said.

“So we’re coming to the White House,” whatever the hell Amy’s sister’s name was said, “like that other guy said we could, and you are going to give us a tour, and don’t you _dare_ tell me otherwise.”

“Right,” Dan said. “Sure.”

She let out a little huff of breath. “Good,” she said, and hung up the phone, leaving him to stare at the receiver.

“You colossal fuck-up,” he told Jonah, shoving it in his chest. “Do you realize what we’re going to have to deal with now? We’re going to have to deal with _family members_.”

“I didn’t know what to do!” Jonah protested. “She just started yelling!”

“Why did you even pick up the phone?” Dan asked, aggrieved. “Why the fuck did you think that was—”

Ben appeared from the opposite doorway, looking like he had just woken up from a long nap, which wasn’t impossible. “What are you two lovebirds fighting about now?” he asked, rubbing at one of his eyes.

“Jonah here decided to answer the phone, and now we’re saddled with Amy’s whole family coming for a visit,” Dan said, and Ben blinked.

“She called three times,” Jonah muttered.

“Well, isn’t that festive,” Ben said. “Maybe her family can write a new draft of the comprehensive immigration reform bill.”

“Maybe Jonah can defenestrate himself,” Dan said.

“Nice, Dan,” Jonah said. “Nice. We’re only on the second floor.”

“Great, so you’ll break your spine, minimum,” he replied. “How do I lose?”

 

*

 

They made Jonah tell Amy her family was coming, and that she had forgotten her dad’s birthday, and Dan actually thought for a moment that she was going to rip his throat out. Someday, he thought dreamily, she was going to actually punch him in the face, and he was going to jerk off to the image for the rest of his life. Masturbating to anything remotely connected to Jonah was a disgusting prospect, but he’d manage. It would be worth it.

“I have to do this,” she said, clutching her laptop. “I don’t have time for my _parents_.”

“Well, it is your dad’s birthday,” Ben said. “He hit you growing up?”

“What? No,” Amy said.

“Then you have time for your parents,” he said, sitting down heavily.

“Maybe the server will go down,” Jonah said optimistically.

“Jonah,” Amy said. “We do not _want_ that. We do not _want_ this to go wrong. Also, the bill does not exist in the cloud.”

“Well, it does,” Dan said. “But not exclusively.”

Amy groaned into her hands and collapsed into a chair again, and opened her laptop.

“You know, the world won’t end if this isn’t finished by Monday,” Ben said. “There’s no deadline.”

“Selina said it would be introduced by the end of the month,” Amy snapped. “Monday is the end of the month. If we let it go much longer, they’ll be recessing before anybody even has time to _look_ at it—”

“Amy,” Ben said. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to happen. They aren’t going to vote for it.”

She stared.

“That’s a very—defeatist attitude, Ben,” she said, sounding slightly strangled.

“The Senate’s probably just going to pretend it doesn’t exist anyway,” Dan muttered, and Ben pointed at him as if in victory.

“You are both—god, just miserable fucks,” Amy said, turning back to her computer. “As though nobody should try to do anything just because—”

“Look at you,” Dan said. “So optimistic all of the sudden. Is that the shine of patriotism I see before me?”

“Not how the quote goes, Dan,” Ben said, and he shrugged.

Jonah poked his head through the door. “They’re going to be here in five minutes,” he said, and Amy choked on nothing.

“What?” she said incredulously.

“Yes, I believe they picked somewhere close to the White House on purpose so that it would be convenient for you,” he told her, looking like he was about to bolt, and Ben carefully drew the computer away from her as she slowly rested her head down on her arms.

“We’ll show them the Lincoln Bedroom,” he said, and she groaned.

They sent Jonah down to get them and deal with security, because it was all his fault (except that it was really Amy’s—“Why didn’t they call you?” Dan asked, when Jonah left, and she said, guiltily, “They did, three times”), and Dan was on the phone with an aide again when the door slammed open and the office was full of Brookheimers.

“I’m gonna have to call you back,” he said.

“Amy,” her mother cried, making a beeline over to smother her, while Amy patted her back awkwardly; her father was standing with his hands in his pants pockets, looking so impressed with the place Dan thought he was probably about to whistle. Her sister looked straight at him and glared.

“Quite a place you’ve got here, Ames,” her father said. “A helluva place.”

“I mean, it’s not _mine_ ,” Amy muttered. “Happy birthday.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” he said, and then swooped in himself. Dan tried not to smirk.

Ben was ingratiating himself in a helpfully avuncular fashion, and Dan was just thinking that he might actually be able to just sneak out and escape all of it when Mrs. Brookheimer said, “Dan! It’s so _wonderful_ to see you again!”

“Um,” he said, as she buzzed over and clasped his hands before patting him warmly on the back, “you too.”

“Don’t be so nice to him, Mom, he’s a leech,” Amy’s sister said, and her mother tutted.

“Don’t be silly, he got Amy that very impressive job when she was in such dire straits a while back,” she said, beaming. “I think you’re a _very_ loyal young man, Daniel.”

“I don’t think anybody has ever said that about me before,” Dan said, honestly, “but thank you.”

“Uh, Mom, why don’t you come over here,” Amy said, hurrying over and grabbing her mother by the arm. She was looking at both of them suspiciously, but once her mother was walking away and she was still glaring at him over her shoulder, he mouthed an obvious _THANK YOU_ at her, and she rolled her eyes.

Having kicked Jonah out for the day (“For your sins,” Dan told him, quite seriously), he had free reign over the office while Ben and Amy took her family around the building. He’d caught just a little of what they were saying as they set off; Ben was really putting on the middle-aged man show for Amy’s dad, who was, Dan could now see, about as much a dad as anyone had ever been, probably, and so was eating it up. Ben, Dan reflected, despite any personal harm done to him in the past, was probably the only person in this whole fucking office with any sense of ethics. It was unsettling and kind of off-putting, but also sort of reassuring, from time to time.

He hacked away at the bill almost mindlessly until they came back, even her sister looking dazzled, and went to make coffee and get the weird fancy biscuits out of the cabinet in the kitchen stored away for these kinds of situations while they all chatted. He passed them around like some kind of butler—her sister seemed to find this amusing—and wound up in front of Mrs. Brookheimer last, who was sitting slightly apart from the others, and looking down and looking at her phone.

“Oh, thank you, Dan,” she said. “I’m just a little tired. It’s been a busy day, you know. No sleep last night.”

“Of course, ma’am,” he said, and she patted his arm.

“So polite,” she said, and took a sip of her coffee. “You know,” she continued, voice low enough that he had to lean forward to hear, “my Amy was so very upset after that unfortunate business all that time ago. But I can see that you’re a very fine young man.”

“Uh, thank you,” he said, wondering how best to make a quick exit.

“And I always felt so badly about your poor father,” she went on, looking so immensely sympathetic—Amy never looked that sympathetically at anybody—“and, you know, thought about what it must have been like for you at that age, and it just broke my heart. But I’m sure he would be very proud of you now.”

“I,” he started, brain screeching to a halt, “I—uh—”

“That’s quite all right, dear,” she said, patting his hand. “Mothers and daughters talk about these things, you know. And mothers do worry. It’s in our nature.”

“Yes,” he croaked. “Of course.”

“I’ll stop tormenting you now,” she said, getting up and patting him on the shoulder. “I do hope we’ll be seeing you again soon, somewhere other than the White House.”

“Um,” he said, and she let out a little conspiratorial chuckle, and breezed off back to the rest of her family.

He wasn’t sure if he moved at all until, some indeterminate period of time later, they were all getting ready to leave—Ben was good at getting rid of unwanted guests without them realizing that they were unwanted—and Amy was standing alone near Sue’s desk, staring intently at her phone. He managed to walk over to her without falling over anything, which he thought was impressive.

“Amy,” he hissed.

“What,” she said, without looking up from her phone.

“Amy,” he hissed again. “How does your mother know about—know about _my dad_.”

“I told her,” Amy said. She still hadn’t looked up from her phone. “Women do talk to their mothers, Dan, it’s not against the rules.”

He stared. “Amy—how do _you_ know about my dad.”

She blinked once, twice, and then looked up at him. “You told me,” she said slowly. “As you may recall.”

“No,” he said. “I do not. And I think I would recall that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, “I would, because you told me about your dad’s tragic death and then two days later went off to OSU and fucked some college intern or volunteer or whatever; it was the most obvious self-sabotage I’ve ever witnessed, and I work with politicians.”

He stared. His mind was full of white noise.

“I don’t remember any of that,” he said. “That didn’t happen.”

“Telling me about your dad, or fucking the twenty-year-old?” she asked. “Because I’m pretty concretely positive they both—”

“No, I remember the twenty-year-old,” he said. She’d been hot. “But I don’t—”

She blinked again and squinted at him. “Are you losing it again? Are you going to have some kind of nervous collapse?”

“No,” he said, trying to scoff. “I’m fine. I’m totally fine. Maybe I have early-onset Alzheimer’s.”

“Would that be better?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I don’t have that either.”

In fact his chest was feeling weird and bad, in a way he distinctly recognized, but he wasn’t about to tell her that, or about to fall over like some kind of mental patient because of it. He had all kinds of shit in his medicine cabinet that he’d never flushed down the toilet because he figured, worse case, he could turn to petty crime, or better, sneak something into Jonah’s drink when the opportunity presented itself. But maybe, he now thought somewhat hysterically, he just hadn’t wanted to get rid of them.

“Okay,” Amy said suspiciously, looking back down at her phone. “Well, all of that did happen, I didn’t stalk you. I don’t even know how I would have.”

She was, of course, right; his father had died before everything was so easily Google-able, and he was pretty sure she hadn’t tracked down the microfilm of the Hartford paper. Which meant that they had, in fact, had this conversation, and he had forgotten it. Because he was crazy, or something.

“Right,” he said. “I’m going to go home now.”

“I’m going to go have dinner with my family,” she said, plastering a fake smile on her face. “Guess who my mother’s going to talk about all night?”

“Selina?” Dan asked.

“No, you idiot,” Amy said. “You.”

 

*

 

One of the chief positive side-effects of his policy of non-engagement had traditionally been that he didn’t ever have to meet anyone’s parents; in fact, the only time he’d ever met the parents of someone he was dating had been in high school, when he’d dated the co-captain of the debate team for two years and spent half his time living at her house practicing and planning tournaments. They’d done partner debate. It was probably the most collaborative Dan had ever been in his life. The sex, frankly, had been secondary, and the summer before college she’d told him straight-up that she didn’t think it was practical for them to keep going out, which was a relief, because he’d been trying to work out how to tell her the same thing. He still wrote on her Facebook wall on her birthday, which he considered an incredibly high compliment because he avoided everyone else he’d known in high school—and most of the people he’d known in college—like the plague. She was a big-shot prosecutor in Los Angeles now, he was pretty sure. _She_ didn’t have any kids. She hadn’t gotten sucked into that trap.

In retrospect, some things were beginning to make sense.

Like, for instance, the fact that he had slept with the girl at Ohio State, whose name he couldn’t remember—he couldn’t remember much of anything about her anymore, except that she’d been hot, which concerned him; for most of his life he’d been able to remember in vivid detail not only all the hot girls he’d slept with but also all the hot girls he’d so much as fantasized about—when he’d been dating somebody he actually liked for the first time in memory, for longer than he’d dated anybody ever, unless you counted high school, which he didn’t. He hadn’t ever spent any time actually thinking about this. It was just a seminal event in his life: Broke Up With Amy. Then he’d spent ten years vaguely keeping track of her online, or more carefully keeping track of her once she latched onto Selina, until he finally wound up getting the job in Selina’s office and got to pester her as much as he pleased. The fact that there might have been a pattern to this behavior had not, up to this point, occurred to him. He tried to reason with himself that it had been a long time since it had all happened, and it wasn’t like he’d been hung up on her for ten years—this, at least, was true—but then found himself thinking that it was also slightly strange and probably unhealthy to have wound up hanging around the only person you’d ever seriously dated over a decade after that had happened, especially if “seriously dated” meant “six months.”

Also, he’d apparently erased telling her about his one emotional vulnerability, which also suggested nothing good.

By the time he got home he felt like he’d run a marathon, although in fact he’d only driven his car for fifteen minutes. He dropped his briefcase on the ground, pulled off his suit jacket, and yanked at his tie, which felt like a noose (could your neck break in that direction?). He was taking some fucking drugs.

He practically jumped out of his skin when his phone rang, and instead swore violently, and answered it: it was his mother.

“Yes,” he said tersely.

“Is this a bad time?” she asked, and he pressed the hell of his hand against his temple, which felt like it was about to explode.

“No,” he said. “Fine. I just got home from work.”

“You work so much,” she said with a little sigh. “Sometimes I worry.”

“It wasn’t bad,” he lied. “We’re working on an important bill.”

“Oh, I know what you do is very important,” she said. He could hear her moving around in the background, the faint generic sounds of household activity enveloping her. “But a mother does worry.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s fine.”

“I haven’t heard from you in a while,” she said. “I just wanted to check in.”

“Nothing’s going on,” he said. “Just work.”

“Well, I guess that’s good,” she said, in a tone of voice that strongly suggested it was not. “You know, your cousin Geoffrey’s wife Helen just announced she’s pregnant, isn’t that wonderful? They’re due in September. They sure have been keeping it under wraps.”

“That’s great,” he ground out, “for Geoffrey.”

“He always was such a sweet boy,” she said, “and was very nice to you when you were little, and everything was going on. And I was so worried it wasn’t going to happen for him; he was getting older, you know. But that woman just turned his life around. And she wasn’t about to wait.”

“Apparently not,” he said. Geoffrey had been a sadistic little shit. Geoffrey had killed frogs. Geoffrey had been meaningfully involved in Dan being persuaded that killing a dog was a good idea, which was knowledge that would probably give his mother a stroke if she ever found out about it. _Geoffrey_ was probably going to spawn more sadistic little shits that the world didn’t need. _Mazel tov_ , he thought.

There was a meaningful pause. When he didn’t fill it, she moved on to other members of the extended family he didn’t care about, and his eye developed a twitch.

Once he’d finally gotten rid of her, he made a beeline for the bathroom, and, fumbling around in his medicine cabinet, surveyed his options: Xanax, Klonopin, and Ativan, which his psychiatrist had prescribed in rapid succession. The psychiatrist had wanted him to go back, he now remembered, but he’d ignored him, because he obviously didn’t have any psychological problems. He wondered what Dr. Klein would say if he went in and told him he had a repressed memory. He’d assume he’d been abused as a child, obviously, and then would probably either become considerably less or considerably more interested once Dan told him it was a repressed memory of his own fucking feelings as an adult. Dr. Klein had had concerns about him that he had, for the most part, dismissed out of hand. He did not work _too much_. He _liked it_. And his father had died twenty-six years ago, not three months ago. If he were suffering from some kind of long, drawn-out psychological impairment as a result of whatever childhood trauma bullshit Dr. Klein had mentally ascribed to him, he thought he would probably have noticed by now. He was thirty-fucking-eight years old, he wasn’t _six_. Sometimes, people were just assholes. Dan was just an asshole. He _liked_ being an asshole. Being an asshole was freeing.

Of course, when he’d gone back he’d tried to perform the best Good Patient routine possible—to get out of there quickly, obviously—Dr. Klein, who was a nebbishy sort of old Jewish man, a total walking stereotype, had said, somewhat sadly, “You don’t have to perform for me, Dan. Or impress me. I’m interested in you as you really are.” He’d stared blankly back at him. “How would you describe yourself, as you really are?” Dr. Klein had prompted, and he’d started to sweat.

He unscrewed the top of the bottle of Xanax, shook one out, and swallowed it dry. Fifteen minutes later, when he wasn’t feeling any different, he said, “Fuck it,” and popped another.

 

*

 

“Amy,” he said. “Amy. I can’t feel my face.”

“Dan?” she said. “What the fuck?”

He pressed his phone more closely to his ear. “No, wait. I can. It feels weird.”

There was a long pause from the other end of the line. “Dan,” she said. “Are you having another panic attack.”

“No,” he said. “I’m stoned.”

“You’re stoned,” she said, sounding skeptical.

“I am—very—stoned,” he said. “Did you know I killed a dog once?”

“I—what?” she said. “What the hell did you take? Where _are_ you?”

“On the floor,” he said. He was lying on the floor of his living room and staring at the ceiling.

“It was old,” he said. “It was probably a mercy killing.”

“I don’t think you want to be telling me this, and I definitely don’t want to know,” she said. “Are you going to overdose? I barely even know how drugs work.”

“I don’t know how _babies_ work,” he said. “How do babies work? Do you have to set a timer to feed them or something? Why do they burp?”

“Are you at your house?” Amy said. “Because if you are, I’m coming over there, I don’t want you to die.”

“I’m not going to die,” he said, offended. “I only took three. Four? I just have a low tolerance.”

“I—I don’t—just don’t move,” she said, defeated. “God. Unless you feel sick. Or like you’re going to pass out. Then—I don’t know, go to the toilet, or call an ambulance.”

“I don’t know where my phone is,” he said.

“Dan,” she said. “ _You’re on the phone_.”

“Oh,” he said, somewhat surprised. “Right.”

“I’m going to speed,” she said. “If I get a ticket, you’re paying it.”

She got there remarkably quickly. He craned his neck around to look at the door when she started to knock, and then remembered he had to open it. The process took some time.

“Amy,” he said when he finally managed to get the door open, and then practically fell on her.

“Jesus Christ, Dan,” she said, clearly trying to restrain herself from automatically shoving him off of her. “What the fuck?”

“You can get some good drugs if you go crazy,” Dan told her, very seriously. “This shit is legal.”

“I can’t—you need to lie down, or something,” Amy said. “Where is your bedroom?”

He jerked his head in the right direction and they stumbled down the hallway. She was still wearing her work clothes. Once she dumped him on his bed, she kicked her shoes off, and let out a deep sigh.

“Weren’t you having dinner with your parents?” he asked, peering up at her.

“I was,” she said tightly. “Then I finally managed to escape, and you called me. Because this, apparently, is _my_ job.”

“Oh,” he said, and then, after a long pause, added, “your mom likes me.”

“I know,” Amy said, folding her arms in front of her. “She never shuts the fuck up about you; no matter what I tell her, she will not be disabused of the notion that you are some kind of knight in fucking shining armor who’s going to rescue me from spinsterhood.”

Dan tried to keep up with this and mostly succeeded. “She and my mom would get along,” he said. “They’re exactly the same.”

“Uh huh,” Amy said.

“I’m serious,” he said. “It’s messed up. They’re both too nice.” He paused. “Every time I talk to my mom she talks about babies.”

Amy snorted. “Bummer she didn’t get another kid.”

“She had a miscarriage,” he said, and Amy blanched.

“You need to not take drugs anymore,” she said. “I do not need to be hearing this shit.”

“How do babies’ bones not just break?” he wondered aloud. “Their hands are so tiny.”

She stared. “Dan,” she said. “Are you secretly yearning for a house in the suburbs and two-point-five children?”

“No,” he said, and shuddered, all through his body. He was thinking about one of his other cousins’ many babies whom he’d been saddled with at the last family gathering a couple of years ago, who had become enamored of his face and spent hours trying to grab it while strapped to his chest.

“They laugh at the same thing no matter how many times you do it,” he said. “They’re like voters.”

“I don’t know what is happening in your head right now, and I don’t think I want to,” Amy said. “But that’s a very flawed metaphor.”

“Doesn’t your sister have a kid?” he said suddenly, remembering, and Amy let out an explosive sigh, and perched on the edge of the bed.

“Yes,” she said. “She’s with her dad today, apparently. Too little for restaurants. Prone to temper tantrums.”

“Is she cute?” he asked.

Amy shrugged. “I dunno,” she said. “I haven’t really seen her much. I don’t like babies.”

“How can you not like babies?” he asked. “They’re like tiny people built to love you.”

“That is a very revealing sentiment,” she said, “but I think you’re forgetting the part where they scream all the time and can’t feed themselves or control when or where they shit.”

“Hmm,” he said meditatively.

“Are you having some pre-midlife crisis about having kids?” she said incredulously. “Are you going to propose to some stupid intern and knock her up just to make yourself feel big and strong? Because I have to tell you, I don’t really think you seem in a place to make major decisions right now.”

He made a face. “I don’t want to sleep with interns,” he said. “They’re so young and stupid. They’re like teenagers, but the advanced level.”

“I never thought I’d see this day,” she said. “Dan Egan, disavowing interns.”

“I haven’t slept with an intern in years,” he said. “They aren’t useful.” She rolled her eyes.

“Okay, are you going to propose to some strategically important daughter of some senator or general and knock her up?” she asked. “Because that also seems like a bad idea.”

“No,” he said. “That would be boring. And stupid.”

“Really,” she said. “Boring. Stupid.”

“Yes,” he said, annoyed, craning his head to look at her better. “I’m not _completely_ Machiavellian, you know.”

“Um, yes, you are,” she said.

“I didn’t sleep with _you_ because you were _useful_ ,” he said, affronted, and she huffed.

“That was twelve years ago, Dan,” she told him. “Actually, thirteen.”

“It still _counts_ ,” he said, aggrieved.

“Sure,” she said. “If you really feel that strongly about it.”

Neither of them said anything for a while. He stared at the ceiling and listened to his heartbeat in his ears. “I still don’t remember telling you about my dad,” he said, and when he looked over she actually looked uncomfortable and uncertain, which was practically unprecedented.

“Well,” she said, “you did. So.”

“I believe you,” he said. “But I don’t remember it.”

“Well,” she said again, and then seemed stumped.

“I’m pretty sure my psychiatrist thinks I’m fucked in the head,” he said. “I only went a couple times.”

“Everybody in Washington is fucked in the head,” she said, and he smiled a little.

“True,” he said. “At least I’m not Selina.”

She shuddered. “You are definitely not Selina.”

There was another long pause, and then she looked at him almost surreptitiously. “Do you want to tell me about it?” she asked, sounding supremely uncomfortable. Amy, he knew, hated feelings almost as much as he did. “I mean, your dad.”

He blinked. “But I did already.”

“Yeah, well,” she said. “You don’t remember doing it.”

“Oh,” he said. “Right. Okay.”

She looked at him for another moment and then pushed herself up on the bed a little more and lay back down next to him, hands folded over her belly, waiting. He looked at her and then up at the ceiling again.

“Well,” he said. “I was twelve. Or, no, I was eleven. When he got diagnosed. My dad.”

“How old was he?”

“Forty-three,” he said. “He was the assistant attorney general of Connecticut. Did I tell you that?”

“No,” she lied. He could tell she was lying.

“Well, the attorney general was going to run for the Senate the next election and he was going to run for attorney general. But he got pancreatic cancer first, so.” He made a _poof_ ing sound.

“That’s one of the bad ones.”

“That’s one of the bad ones,” he agreed. “It took like five months. I was in the sixth grade. Nobody talked to me at school the rest of the year.”

“What?”

“Always happens,” he said. “Nobody knows how to deal with it. Anyway, we moved to Greenwich.”

“That’s horrible,” she said.

“I guess,” he said. “I don’t remember it that well. It was a long time ago.”

“Your mother never remarried?”

“Nope,” he said. “Just lives vicariously through me.”

Amy snorted. “I know,” he said. “Really won the lottery.”

Neither of them said anything for a long, stretched-out minute, and then Amy, sounding very awkward, asked, “What was your dad—like?”

He wasn’t sure how to answer. He knew exactly how to describe his father as his mother described him, which was how you described a politician. But he remembered him as just—stuff. Like light through a kaleidoscope.

“He was kind of an asshole,” he said. “Or a hard-ass, I don’t know. He worked all the time. He would have gone crazy if my mom had ever gotten a job. Lots of family money. _Lots_. Kind of New England rich, though. You don’t talk about it. Except with all the WASPs. He liked fucking with the WASPs. The Irish are fuckers, you know.

“He was very liberal,” he added after a moment. “I mean, actually believed all the shit. He literally used to tell me he was missing my baseball games because he was making the country a better place for people who had less than we did.”

“Oh my god,” Amy said, sounding both horrified and impressed.

“I know,” said Dan, who was feeling similarly. “He was a real bastard. _Great_ lawyer.”

“He’d probably hate Selina,” Amy said after a moment’s pause, and Dan started to laugh.

“He would _hate_ Selina,” he said, and then kept laughing, so hard that tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. “Oh my _god_.”

“And Jonah,” she added, almost under her breath, and he pressed his hands into his eyes, shaking from laughter.

“If he had ever met Jonah,” he said when he’d finally calmed down, wiping his tears away, “he would have verbally castrated him so effectively his dick would never have worked right again.”

“Vivid,” Amy said, and Dan let out another bark of laughter before calming down.

They lay there for a while in silence. Headlights from the cars passing outside were flashing across the window, and watching them was making his heartbeat slow, almost rhythmically.

“I’m really sorry,” Amy said, jerking him out of his trance. She sounded uncomfortable. He turned to the side and saw that she looked it, too. “About your dad. It’s—it’s really unfair.”

“Oh,” he said. “Thanks.”

She scratched at her cheek. Neither of them said anything. He had no idea what time it was but he wanted to sleep.

“Want to sleep over?” he asked, and she leaned back slightly, looking startled.

“Dan,” she said. “I don’t know if you understand _how_ foreplay works, but—”

He rolled his eyes and vaguely waved one slightly flopping hand. “That’s not what I mean.”

She looked at him for another moment and then sighed. “Fine,” she said. “But I am _not_ undressing you. You have to work out those buttons yourself.”

 

*

 

The sun woke him up in the morning, aggressively bright, and he squinted at it in protest: he had forgotten to close the blinds. He glanced over and blinked fuzzily as the previous evening came back to him at the sight of Amy curled into a tight ball next to him on the bed. He tried to remember if she had always slept like that. He was pretty sure she hadn’t. Even he wasn’t that stressed all the time, he thought. It was amazing she managed to stay upright.

She must have felt the bed shifting because she blinked hazily and then more quickly, gaze snapping around the room and then up at him. “ _Ugh_ ,” she said, with feeling.

“Thanks, that’s usually what I’m going for,” he said, and she turned to push her face into the pillow.

“I feel hungover,” she said into the pillow, muffled, “and I didn’t even drink yesterday. Much.”

“You shouldn’t,” he said, turning to look at the clock, “because we slept for… fourteen hours.”

She jerked up, panic-stricken. It was sort of cute, he thought. Her hair was sticking up on one side of her head and she had pillow-creases in her cheek. “We’re supposed to be at work,” she said.

“Well, we aren’t,” he said. “Also, it’s a Sunday.”

“The bill,” she said.

“The bill’s not fucking happening,” he said. “If it comes to it, we can distract Selina with Catherine tomorrow. She’ll forget Mexico ever existed.”

Amy groaned and stuck her face back into the pillow, and he suddenly felt like it was the Kasinski campaign again, and he had a cute young girlfriend who needed to be protected from the pure evil that was American electoral politics. Now that girl was Amy. Life, he thought, was wild.

He sighed, and stretched back against his pillows, looking at the ceiling. He felt pleasantly blitzed now, like he was supposed to, as if he had taken a normal dose instead of too much. Amy, he thought, really ought to get on something. Or start smoking pot.

“Wanna get brunch?” he asked, turning to look at her.

“It will look like we slept together,” she said.

“Everybody already thinks we’re sleeping together,” he pointed out, and she sighed.

They wandered down the road to the hipster brunch place farther down Dan’s street and stared at their phones for a half-hour until a table in the back opened up. It was nice out. She was wearing one of his sweaters, which was old and stretched-out, and a pair of leggings that he’d found in the drawer of women’s clothes he’d acquired over time, abandoned by flings and ex-girlfriends.

“You,” she said, “are incredible. This is incredible. I cannot believe this.”

“It’s that or you put the suit back on,” he said. “Or wear pajamas.”

They didn’t say much until the food came, and Amy started picking at her depressing omelet and kale salad, looking morose. Dan shoved a pancake onto her plate and stole some of her salad, having anticipated this, and she guiltily started to eat it.

“Maybe she can get parts of the bill done herself,” he said eventually, and Amy sighed.

“No, it’s fucked,” she said. “The whole thing’s fucked. The government is fucked.”

“Well, yes,” he said. “That’s a given.” He ate a bite of salad. It wasn’t bad. “Who knows, maybe redistricting will work wonders and all our pipe dreams will come true in a few years.”

“Redistricting won’t make the country less fucking crazy,” Amy said, stabbing at her omelet, and he couldn’t really argue.

“What’s that quote about democracy? The people vote and then get what they deserve, or something,” Dan said. “We’re here to give it to them.” She sighed.

“So, how about Catherine’s new boyfriend,” he said after they’d been eating in silence for a moment.

“Her _what_ ,” she said, and he raised his eyebrows.

“Uh huh,” he said. “I heard it from Gary.”

“Nobody ever tells me anything,” she said. “Why on earth did Gary tell you?”

“I overheard something and scared it out of him,” he said, “it wasn’t hard. Get a load of this: he’s a _black anarchist_.”

“ _No_ ,” Amy gasped, leaning forward.

“Hand to god,” Dan said, leaning back in his seat and grinning. “He’s been arrested like twenty-five times or something. He’s thirty-five.”

“Oh my _god_ ,” Amy said. “This is going to be a nightmare.”

“But isn’t it amazing,” Dan said. “Isn’t it just _incredible_?”

“It is _so_ amazing,” she said, chewing on pancake. “How many boyfriends is that girl going to find for her mother to force her to break up with before she winds up with some acceptable lawyer or something?”

“Dozens,” Dan said. “Scores.”

Amy sighed. “She’s so young,” she said. “Someday she’ll be less stupid.”

“Someday,” Dan agreed. He caught one of her ankles between his and pulled it closer as he cut another piece off his pancakes. The bone was solid and warm.

She looked over at him skeptically. She’d tied her hair up earlier to avoid dealing with her bedhead. He hadn’t seen it that way in as long as he could remember.

“Your mother thinks I’m _loyal_ ,” he said, grinning, and she huffed out a breath and rolled her eyes.

“My mother is an idiot,” she said.

“She wants me to make an honest woman out of you,” he said, and she practically choked.

“She did not say that,” she said, although she didn’t sound sure.

“No,” he admitted. “But, close enough.”

“What, to have your demon Egan spawn? I don’t think so.”

He crossed his arms and leaning back in his chair, looking at her. “We could do a great job fucking up some children,” he said. “Our children would be the most attractive, highest-achieving fuck-ups imaginable.”

“As ever,” she said, “you really know how to charm a woman.”

“My dad would have liked you,” he told her, and smiled a little, crookedly.

“Thanks, I think,” she said. “If that’s supposed to convince me to have your kids—”

“Well, I think I pretty much turned into my dad, but worse,” he reasoned. “Though you _definitely_ aren’t my mother.”

“You’re missing a few steps here, Dan,” she said. “The steps in-between ‘colleague’ and ‘spouse.’”

“You’re the only person I like,” he told her, which was true.

“That’s not romantic,” she said. “That’s just creepy.”

“Come on, Amy,” he said, and she looked down at her plate for a moment. He remembered, suddenly, that when they had been younger he had been able to tell that she was uncertain and a little afraid, most of the time, although you would never have guessed it. He’d gotten off on it—bragged about it to some of his buddies on the campaign—and felt a weird kind of simultaneous protectiveness and terror when he thought about it privately, because he hadn’t known what the fuck he was doing, either. Maybe everybody was just always afraid, he thought. Dr. Klein would probably be all over _that_ one.

There was, he realized, only one thing to do. It was actually breathtakingly simple. He was surprised it hadn’t occurred to him already, although it was so out of character that it wasn’t actually surprising at all.

“Amy,” he said. “I’m sorry. About, you know. Everything. If that helps.”

She stared. “Well,” she said, slowly moving her hands into her lap. “I never thought I’d see the day.” And when he pushed his foot up along the back of her calf, she returned in kind. He grinned. It only looked a little like a smirk.

**Author's Note:**

> Discussion of the previous death of a parent, during childhood, due to cancer.
> 
> I am at tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com)!


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